Hyper-V vs. VMware vSphere Guest Clustering

Today is my first day of my diploma thesis. The topic of this is “Private Cloud – Migrate from VMware to Hyper-V”, maybe I will find a cooler topic name for it ;-). Now in the first parts I am doing some compare work between Hyper-V and VMware vSphere. I already have posted a blog post about the new scale of Hyper-V 2012 which comes with Windows Server 2012 or Hyper-V Server 2012 as a free product. Now today I will post something about guest clustering on both platforms.

In the TechEd session “VIR311 – Compete to Win | Part I: Comparing Core Virtualization Platforms” from Matt McSpirit (@mattmcspirit) there are some interesting information about guest clustering especially if you are using vSphere. If you are doing guest clustering of Windows Server with VMware vSphere the only thing that is supported is a two node cluster with fiber channel. So what does that mean?

VMware does not support VM Guest Clustering using iSCSI storage.

VMware does not support VM Guest Clustering using File Based Storage i.e. NFS

VMware does not support the vMotion of a VM that is part of a Guest Cluster

VMware does not support the use of Memory Overcommit with a VM that is part of a Guest Cluster

VMware does not support more than two nodes in a guest cluster

With Hyper-V 2012 you can simply do everything. For example you can create a guest cluster up to 64 nodes (with Windows Server 2012) with fiber channel, iSCSI or SMB storage and still using live migration. Right Microsoft is supporting Fiber channel in the Virtual Machine guest and you still can live migrate this Virtual Machine.

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My name is Thomas Maurer. I am a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. I am part of the Azure engineering team and engage with the community and customers around the world. I am located in Switzerland. I am focusing on Microsoft technologies, especially cloud and datacenter solutions based on Microsoft Azure, Azure Stack and Windows Server. Opinions are my own.